Inkjet printers have gained wide acceptance as desktop printing devices and are set to rival other conventional printing techniques as the quality and speed of the inkjet printing process have improved. An inkjet printer forms an image by printing a pattern of individual dots at particular locations of a grid defined for the printing medium. Inkjet printers print the dots by ejecting very small drops of ink onto a printing medium. The printing medium is typically fed past the inkjet printhead in an indexed motion. The printhead is typically located on a movable carriage that supports one or more printheads each having ink ejecting nozzles. The carriage traverses over the surface of the printing medium, and the nozzles eject drops of ink at appropriate times according to image data provided by a controller. In each traverse of the printhead carriage a swath is printed, followed by an indexing of the printing medium feed.
In extending inkjet printing beyond the desktop printing market, a key limitation has been printing speed. While it is acceptable to have a printing device with productivity in the region of a few pages per minute for personal use, productivity of commercial printing devices must be far greater.
The need to traverse the printhead across the printing medium can be largely or altogether avoided if sufficient nozzles are provided to cover the width of the page. Known as a “page wide array”, such devices with a multiplicity of addressable inkjet nozzles may be used to enable an entire page to be printed in a single pass.
There remains a need for techniques that increase the speed of inkjet printing and in particular, there is a need for high productivity inkjet-based printing devices.